The Steam Revenue Report - We Love It

THE GALAXY

Every paid game on Steam with at least one review, as one dot. Time runs left to right;<br>estimated lifetime earnings run bottom to top on a logarithmic scale. Colour is the game's<br>review score. Hover for a name, click to open its page.

Show every game<br>Switch to a linear scale

The vertical axis is logarithmic: each gridline is ten times the one below it. On a linear<br>scale the same chart is a flat line and about two hundred visible dots, which is the whole<br>story of Steam's economy in one picture — the button above will show you.

LOOK IT UP

How much did a particular game make?

THE LONG TAIL

How concentrated is the money? The curve below plots the share of games against the share<br>of revenue they account for. The straight diagonal is what perfect equality would look like.

Gini coefficient

0 would mean every game earns the same; 1 would mean one game earns everything.<br>For comparison, national income Gini coefficients run from about 0.25 to 0.63.<br>Check out the Blue Ocean Games piece on this topic<br>here.

These figures don't move when you change the multiplier — every game's estimate<br>scales by the same factor, so the shares between them stay put.

Worth noting a limitation of the reviews → revenue method:<br>8,768 paid games have no reviews at all.<br>Too few sales to measure, not necessarily zero sales.

WHAT A TYPICAL GAME EARNS

Read this as: a game at the 90th percentile earned more than 90% of all paid games on Steam.

Outcome tiers

Every paid game, sorted into earnings bands. The counts shift when you change the Boxleiter multiplier (see way above), as the bands are dollar amounts and the estimates move underneath them.

Tier<br>Games<br>% of games<br>% of revenue

What $10,000 in estimated gross actually means for a developer: Valve takes 30%, VAT and<br>regional taxes come off the top in most territories, and refunds and chargebacks come off<br>after that. The figure that reaches a bank account is smaller than the one<br>on this page.

THE CLASS OF EACH YEAR

Steam's catalogue grew faster than its revenue. These three charts show what that did to<br>an individual game's prospects.

Games released per year

Median lifetime earnings by release year

Switch to a logarithmic scale

The above is by stated release year, and not necessarily the year a game was released on Steam.<br>This one starts at 2003: the handful of games with earlier release years are mostly all-time<br>hits, and their medians are large enough to flatten every year since into the axis.<br>Even from 2003 the fall is steep enough to squash the recent years flat — the button above<br>switches to a logarithmic scale, where each gridline is ten times the one below it, to read them.<br>Recent years are marked &ldquo;so far&rdquo;: a game released this year has had less time to<br>accumulate reviews than one released a decade ago, so those bars will keep rising.

Outcome mix by release year

Each year as 100%, split across the earnings tiers. This is the answer to<br>&ldquo;were a new game's odds better in 2016 than in 2025?&rdquo; Click any segment to browse<br>the games in it.

GENRE ECONOMICS

Median and top-decile earnings for the biggest genres. A game counts towards a genre only<br>when the tag is one of its six most popular tags — so &ldquo;roguelike economics&rdquo; here<br>describes games that are roguelikes, not games that merely carry the tag somewhere<br>down the list.

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Median<br>Top decile<br>Hit rate

Hit rate is the share of a genre's games clearing $100,000 in estimated lifetime earnings.<br>Genre names below link through to that genre's shelf on this site.

WHEN EACH GENRE PEAKED

The same 30 genres, but year by year. Each cell is that genre's median earnings for games<br>released that year, divided by the median for every game released that year. Above<br>1.0 the genre beat the market; below it, it lost.

Dividing by the same year's market makes this (potentially) useful across time.<br>A ratio compares a genre against its own contemporaries, and both halves have had the same<br>number of years to gather reviews, so the accrual bias divides out.

Rows are sorted by their most recent year, so what's working now sits at the top. Blank cells<br>are genre-years with fewer than 20 games — too few for a median to<br>describe anything. Genre membership uses the same top-six-tags rule as the section above.

Crowding vs. payoff

The same ratio one year at a time, against how many games shipped into that genre. Press play<br>on the timeline below the chart to watch the years run.

Each bubble is one genre in the selected year: how many games shipped, against how they did<br>versus the market. Both axes are logarithmic. Bubble size also tracks release count, so it<br>restates the horizontal axis rather than adding a third measure.

THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

What a game charges, and what it earns. Bands are half-open and aligned to Steam's<br>.99 price points, so nothing is counted twice.

Median earnings by launch price band

Share of all estimated revenue by price...